Comment by emptyparadise | Hacker News Reader

Comment by emptyparadise | Hacker News Reader

I miss the old internet.

Discovery and interaction were the big thing - meeting strangers in strange places. Now, that's basically impossible because each site that you use is designed with the goal of boxing you, keeping you where you are, talking to people who are just like you, because that apparently makes the most money. So now you'll pretty much always be stuck in an echo chamber into which only the angriest, meanest crowds can break through.

You could really be anybody, try strange things and explore strange ideas - and you did it all under an alias that you could just easily abandon if you felt unsafe. No doxxing, because nobody knows your real name. Good luck pulling that off now. The logging, the real name/email/phone requirements, it's just not possible anymore. The combined might of sockpuppet abuse, increasing complexity of bad actors' attacks, and the need for gathering real customers' information took that away.

I miss the old internet. And I don't even know how it could have survived to the present day. It makes sense why we entered the age of surveillance capitalism. You give data, you get free stuff. It's simple. People love free stuff, after all. But I wonder, did people even imagine that things would turn out like this? I wonder, is there some sort of an alternate future where this could be avoided? If things played out just a little differently?

What could save the old internet? Could it be the subscription-like model where sites you visit get a few pennies from you? Could it be keeping things decentralized, keeping the costs low enough to be manageable?

Or is this just it, is an internet that's this corporate-greed fueled quest to gather more data and to show you more stuff the only way?

You asked so many great questions that could be part of a LongNow debate / discussion. I think this is a very relevant question / exercise:

"I wonder, is there some sort of an alternate future where this could be avoided?"

There's a dystopian set of novels called "The Domination" where the author explores this. Instead of the Internet, because of a protracted Cold War between two superpowers (not the ones you're thinking), this alternate world has iron fused memory cores immune to any hacking that we can conceive of in our timeline.

Small forums like that did a number of things that I feel we haven’t been able to replicate. You got to know people over time. It wasn’t a feed you vaguely subscribed to, but a forum (in literal definition of the word) that you chose to participate in.

I often think about what probably defines a typical experience online for people these days and I feel that the smaller and more cozy feeling of actual community has been replaced by the digital equivalent of big box stores. Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Twitch, Netflix. Big corporate places with portals and algorithms. I think it's safe to include reddit there now too with the direction that site has been going in.

These aren’t necessarily bad things in and of themselves (aside from the chasing of a world in which _nothing is left unplanned_), but I’m trying to hone in on the idea that the sheer randomness of this medium has more or less vaporized. The concept that anything and everything you do on the Internet wasn’t aggressively being tracked and developed into digital profiles to be traded, used, shared, and sold by ad companies and an array of other organizations was a fart in the wind compared to what it’s like online today. Websites simply didn’t have 5 megabytes+ (!) of Javascript whereas now you need a half a dozen browser extensions to make the internet a halfway decent thing to be on.

My hunch is that once upon a time, people (at least those that even had access to it) had a kind of amateur desire of wanting to create an account at a website (particularly a forum). Coming up on 2019, I think long and hard before creating another account anywhere. There even was an expectation to introduce yourself in some introduction subforum at many of these boards.

A theme that has become completely domineering is the inflated ego linked to tribalism. I see people being so serious about everything; there can be no reciprocal discussion about anything. "You're either with us or against us" and other types of fallacy-addled thinking. I've also seen a lot of the kind of lowbrow "edginess" caked in psuedo-ironic bottom of the barrel commentary where people try to pass off low effort one liners as a means of scoring cheap points with a crowd. And then there's also this brand of posting [0].

Usually this behavior has a negative effect associated with it as this kind of driveby posting encourages more of itself at the expense of discussion. Quality then decreases as people seek other sources of community (I think this is what has been happening with reddit).

I think it’s probably trivial to dismiss this as nostalgia but I feel there are some real truths to this. The Internet is something you had the choice of actually logging off and disconnecting but today, everyone is constantly connected. We are in the age of distraction and preoccupation. Think about it: how many times have you picked up your (smart)phone purely out of reflex, not even to check something with purpose? You see it everywhere in public, certainly. The constant stream of brightly colored iconography, beeps, alerts, buzzing, push/notifications, and beyond are endless. Everything demands your attention, and it is never enough.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/iYT5pPl.png

Wow, you knocked it out of the park. This is exactly how I feel about the direction the internet, or maybe even western society as a whole, has been going in over the last 10 years.

It's been going this way for longer than 10 years if you look past the Internet as the medium.

It might be possible to trace this back to the inception of the 24 hour news networks if not earlier; that first taste of ad-fueled insanity, and the modern terrorist attacks of (2001-0)9-11 on US soil sort of catalyzed the trend. It really became solidly about fear and outrage, and the enfeeblement of being unable to actually do anything to address that negative emotional state.

A real solution is going to require the people as a whole to "grow up", to take responsibility in the sense of breaking the cycles of fear, violence, and greed. To instead focus on building a world where we all get better, and do better overall, rather than individually getting enough and kicking the ladder off for those that should follow.

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